Think about it. If Apple had never recovered from their near-death experience, Linux would have had a Vista-sized window of opportunity to gain desktop share and interest from commercial software houses.

Also, there would have been no Android phones - they'd all be running a stripped-down Linux instead, since there would have already been a viable commercial software-for-profit ecosystem.

And there would be no App store with one company dominating a platform.

No, Microsoft would have made things so proprietary that nothing else would work. The Internet would be closed, OpenOffice and later LibreOffice would not have had the traction.I use Mint, and have used a bunch of other distros over the years, but without Apple to keep some pressure on Microsoft, MS would have been able to crush Linux on the desktop years ago.....

Apple didn't pressure Microsoft to open up - the EU forced them to over Linux, SAMBA, and file formats. Apple is BFF with Microsoft when it comes to software - they're both partners in patent pools, and more telling, Microsoft sells Microsoft Office for the Mac.

Also keep in mind that Apple came out with their XServes to compete - not with Microsoft - but with Linux, then quietly dropped them when they didn't gain traction.

"No he isn't. Look at him, sitting on my computer with his buddy Samba busily getting around Microsoft's insistance that he not interact with the Windows box unless you pay more money for the 'professional' Windows!

"The Windows desktop is alrady on its death bed, and you can't revive him. You have to spend money on another one when he dies. And the new one will need a whole new computer and won't run half your programs. Meanwhile, upgrading Mr. Linux is free, easy, and all your old software still works!"

Well, I'm posting this from Fedora 16, so when I say dead, I don't mean that absolutely nobody uses it - but home users using it exclusively? It's a rounding error.

And you certainly didn't need samba to interact with a Windows box - It's easier to just install Uniform Server on it and let people access what they need to via their browser (or curl or wget). This way, they could be anywhere, and as long as they gave you their router's external IP, it was all good (even for music streaming from home). Sure

Open Server would be great if I needed to access the files from elsewhere, but I don't, so I feel safer with everything behind a firewall.

The reason so few use Linux is because it's hard to buy a PC without Windows preinstalled. Most people have never heard of Linux, or have any idea what an OS is. At least the people I know don't. Hell, I had the notebook that got stolen last year in the bar and one woman asked "what version of Windows is that?"

With todays huge hard drives, there's no real reason people couldn't install linux alongside windows on a new machine - and yet 99% don't. They try the live dvd, and "yeah, it's nice, but it's not what I need because it doesn't run $abc", where $abc is something different for each person.

Look at how quickly Linux went from dominating netbooks to being an also-ran when Microsoft extended XP's lifetime. Compatibility is a huge factor.

Do I like it that it's that way? No - I paid extra for a second hard d

I could run linux pretty much exclusively on it - except when I needed to do flash stuff, or hardware-related printing, or to access my camcorder, or wireless (because all 3 either never worked properly, or broke every upgrade).

Maybe it's the distro, or maybe it's because I run older hardware, only upgrading when necessary, but I never had any of those problems. Win 7 seems not to have native bluetooth support, since the dongle comes with an install CD for Windows. It's flaky on the Win7 notebook, just work

I think Gmail, Hotmail, Google docs, Microsoft 365, Facebook, Mozilla (wrt firefox) and a whole slew of others would disagree with you on that.

Market share, even in F/LOSS, attracts volunteers, donations, users for other services, etc. Without that, it either dies or becomes irrelevant (the whole "if an open source project fails in the noosphere and nobody hears it, did it make a noise? thing:-)